How worried should we be about the nation’s mind-boggling deficit? The news dropped last week — the US national debt topped a record $40 trillion. Marquette University’s Dr. Margaret Hughes-Morgan says tariff refunds and maturing older debt have contributed to the exploding deficit.

“These tariffs were ruled to be unconstitutional, and so they’ve had to pay that. But the other thing that made it explode very quickly is aging debt. When older debt matures, you get exploding interest payments. The biggest payment for the United States is the interest rate on the deficit. The other thing that’s happening is that the entitlement programs have expanded.”

Defaulting on the debt is unlikely —  Hughes-Morgan notes Congress will again raise the debt ceiling to prevent that from happening.

“So this, I don’t think, is something that Americans really need to panic about. I mean, obviously it would be better if we did not have all of this debt.”

Hughes-Morgan says Congress reducing the debt in any meaningful way is also unlikely.

“Because the amount of cuts that they would have to make would be tremendous, and that would impact households. Taxes would have to go up, and any kind of entitlement program would have to be cut dramatically in order to address the amount of debt that we’ve gotten ourselves into.”

Hughes-Morgan is a professor in the Management department at Marquette.